


The matter of shadows

by MisanthropyMuse



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood Memories, Dreams, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Holmes Brothers' Childhood, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mind Palace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 18:19:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3701803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MisanthropyMuse/pseuds/MisanthropyMuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There's a door carefully hidden somewhere inside Sherlock Holmes, never to be opened.</i><br/>It's been inside him since forever, and it's been jealously guarded in the tangle of palaces and soul that's his mind.<br/>He keeps it closed with extreme attention and he's always very careful not to trip on it, because it might be an obstacle if he lowers his defences for even a few seconds: it might be fatal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The matter of shadows

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [La stessa materia delle ombre](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/108047) by Amelia Sweetedge. 



_Close your eyes,_  
_have no fear,_  
_the monsters gone,_  
_[...]_  
_beautiful boy._  
_Before you go to sleep,_  
_say a little prayer,_  
_every day in every way,_  
_it's gettin better and better._  
_[...]_  
_Before you cross the street,_  
_take my hand,_  
_life is just what happens to you,_  
_while you're busy making other plans._  
  
_\- John Lennon_

 

There's a door carefully hidden somewhere inside Sherlock Holmes, never to be opened.

It's been inside him since forever, and it's been jealously guarded in the tangle of palaces and soul that's his mind.

He keeps it closed with extreme attention and he's always very careful not to trip on it, because it might be an obstacle if he lowers his defences for even a few seconds: it might be fatal.

Sometimes, at night, when his body gives up and he manages to sleep, he catches a breeze sneaking into his mind that never rests: it spreads, soaring, beyond that door that tastes like his far, distant childhood, and it forces it to open wide without making a sound, without taking space.

Then, he happens to wake up in the middle of the night, just for a few moments: just the time to close it, mentally, gently, without a sound, and then he drifts away towards others bays.

There's a door carefully hidden inside his mind, behind which something close to the idea of Love -that something which he has never managed to understand, unlike cold and clear logic and which, because of that, he has always tried to keep far from, not without a certain disdain- lives amok, in a chamber with neither ceiling, nor floor, nor walls, and can never be hushed: it is there and cannot disappear.

Sometimes in his life, he has caught himself thinking that maybe he never put enough effort in cancelling, controlling and confining that innate, visceral feeling.

Every time he wakes up in the middle of the night, because that breeze has opened a breach in his mind, his father's eyes are staring at him from above, looking down at his 11-years-old self.

 

_-Happy birthday, Sherlock-_

_The child in his memory lowers his eyes, without replying, turning in his hands the little package his father just gave him. He's trying to understand what it is. What he might ever need._

_It's raining outside, just for a change, and just for a change the house is completely silent, apart from the sound of the rain falling or the flames in the fireplace. There had never been much noise in that house._

_-Sherlock?-_

_-Mh?-_

_His father sighs lightly. He's sitting at his right, his arms crossed on the table and a both fond and worried look on his face, directed to the back of his son's head._

_His wife keeps bringing food to the table. She throws around silent and worried looks, now at her husband, and now at her child._

_A few moments later, Mycroft sits at the table without paying attention to anything but his plate._

_-Aren't you opening it?- his father asks._

_Sherlock raises his head, looks in his eyes, looks for an answer he can't find, something he'll never find, because it shouldn't even be looked for -but he won't understand that either-, as he doesn't have to look for a meaning for the smile his father is now giving him. Only him. The sweetest smile Sherlock ever remembers._

_Sherlock finds himself unwittingly raising a corner of his mouth: he half replies to that smile before looking down at the present again and getting to open it with exasperating attention._

_His father sighs again, softly, as he watches him, uneasy._

_Even Mycroft's bored haughty look now rests on his brother's bony, nimble fingers, carefully working between the mahogany wrapping paper._

_Eventually he raises the lid of the box and his eyes fix for a few moments on what is in his hands._

_Sherlock raises his eyes again, looking at his father without understanding._

_-It's a magnifying glass- he explains, smiling._

_-I can see that- Sherlock replies, taking it in his hands._

_-Mph- Mycroft makes, even more bored, before turning his attention back to his plate. He has done his duty for that day._

_His father watches him turning the glass in his hands, Sherlock carefully brings it to an eye, trying to bring into focus his brother sitting in front of him._

_His wife stands behind him, puts a hand on his shoulder and he holds it without looking away from his son._

_-Do you like it?- his mother asks._

_-I can't see the use of it.- Sherlock replies, trying to focus on other parts of the room. His father puff out a little laugh, making him turn around._

_-It's for the answers you can't find on your own- he explains, with a strangely solemn voice, pointing at the glass in his hands._

_Sherlock stares at him for a long time, carefully taking note of the words he had just said._

Redbeard died and he didn't speak for a while. That birthday had been the first of the saddest birthdays ever, but also the sweetest and most intimate he could remember.

 

_In the brief time it takes him to activate his neurons and mentally close that door, his father is handing him a little tube of sunscreen, under the English countryside sunshine.  
-Put it on- he says, sitting next to him on the swing._

_Sherlock is surrounded by notebooks cluttered with notes, he's letting some dirt slid between his fingers, making it land on his other palm and repeating the game, as if his hands were an hourglass._

_Every now and then, he murmurs something._

_His black hair are stuck to his forehead, his face is flushed. Maybe he didn't even notice his father's arrival. Or, probably, he just wanted to ignore his voice._

_The tube of sunscreen is still between them, because Sherlock doesn't even bother to look at it._

_Then, patiently, his father reaches over and, after pulling his hair away from his forehead, he spreads the cream on his face, careful not to cover his eyes and not make him lose his concentration. Sherlock lets him without distracting, he frown a little more instead, as if he had come to some internal fight, a crucial spot, about the dirt he picked up during his lonely walk, that morning._

_He feels his father's fingers move the hair from his nuke, where a breeze can blow now, brushing his neck and making him startle._

_His father pulls back and sighs, as if he was a bit relieved._

_He looks at his son's stronger features, signs of his adolescence and more and more distant from those of a child._

_He smiles, as if he couldn't believe his eyes, because time has slipped between his fingers; he smiles as parents smile, silently, when they find themselves staring at their children's faces and unconsciously, incredulously shaking their head._

_He'll never grow up._

_That's the last thought his father has, his last hope, before leaning against the back of the swing. Sherlock gets it with the corner of his eye: the shadow of a smile still lingering on his face._

_-Tell Mycroft to shut up- he suddenly says._

_His father raises his eyes without understanding._

_-Mh?-_

_-He's screaming around the house like a fool -_

_His father looks around: silence. Their house is several meters behind them and only the soft squeaking of the swing disturbs the summer warmth of that afternoon.  
He doesn't ask ''what are you saying?'' any more._

_He now just looks at him perplexed and says: -How do you know that?-_

_-Because I finished the hot water earlier- replies Sherlock, nonchalantly, writing down a note.  
His fathers gapes at him for a while: he can now imagine his eldest son yelling all around the house. _

_And then he bursts in a loud, heartfelt laughter, one of those you just can't hold back. One of those contagious ones, that rubs off even on the most anti-social, problematic, clever adolescent that finds himself around it.  
And so Sherlock laughs, as if he was giving in to himself, looking at his father shaking his head, amused. _

They never spent another summer holiday at the cottage again, after that time. Or at least not all together: Mycroft's nerves were seriously tested that time, in such an extreme way he had threatened to give them all a slow, painful death if they had ever forced him to take part to that again.  
  
And again, they look at each other, their eyes now almost at the same height, him and his father, in a night Sherlock always hopes he could eradicate from his mind.  
He's close to the door, one step away from closing it, another small effort...

_He switches on the light in the hall, he shivers, feeling a terrible cold that creeps down into his bones or maybe a scorching heat, because he feels an obscure, unknown chaos raving inside his mind and a sharp pain in his stomach forces him to bend over, where he stands on his mother's favourite carpet._

_Sherlock tries to breathe, half gets up, tries to bring the room into focus, but it's still blurry before him. He squeezes his eyes and tries to find his way back to his room, so he automatically turns his head to the right and an unexpected slap -the only one- fiercely hits his cheek and makes him stumble and take a few steps backwards._

_That sharp, loud noise echoes through the silent house._

_Sherlock brings a hand to his cheek, all his senses awoken by the firm blow of his father's hand on his face._

_He looks at him as if he was seeing him for the first time, shocked, motionless and breathless._

_As he is now his father before him. His eyes, so alike his own, express something so close to disgust, or even worse, scorching disappointment. Guilt._

_They look at each other coldly, hurt and tired, now light years away from what they used to be, in a past that sits just behind the corner and keeps turning up before their eyes._  
_His father doesn't say anything that time, that night. He just turns around in a way that to Sherlock -still and panting, as if he had been fixed there forever- seems lasting an entire lifetime._

_He switches off the light that his twenty-year-old addict son had turned on and goes back to bed._

_He turns slowly, tired after a night spent waiting for his return, and leaves him behind._

_That night he won't hold his hand and guide him in the dark._

_That night he turns off the light and lets his son find his way on his own, if he wants, because he feels the weight of all the years he carries behind and all the sleepless nights spent looking for a way to protect him. There is no way. There has never been one._

_And Sherlock stays back in the dark, shivering, stuck standing in that spot, as if he had suddenly woken from his slumber, his face crossed by warm, painful tears, silent and unstoppable_.

That night his father had left him behind, because his son's life didn't belong to him and never had.

 

He had understood that, many years before, and accepted it, in the very moment in which he had turned around: as a father, he had the duty of carrying his child up until one certain point and then letting him go, still loving him as the first time he had seen him and had cried. He couldn't fight his son's genius mind, nor he could dream of having a single piece of it, just to come close to understand his life choices.

That was the only slap he ever gave his son: the only slap he ever gave to anyone in his life.

Nobody has ever seen nor heard him cry, Sherlock Holmes, no one ever managed to, apart from hi father.

Even that night his heart was feeling it as he went back to bed, tired and bitter.

But he didn't change his mind, he held firmly onto his blanket and didn't go back to his son. Not that time.

 

 _Figlio,_  
_disperato giglio,_  
_luce di purissimo smeriglio:_  
_corro nel tuo cuore e non ti piglio._  
_Dimmi dove ti assomiglio,_

 _figlio._  
  
_\- Roberto Vecchioni_

  
There's a door in his mind that Sherlock never opens. Behind it there is his childhood, where the harsh logic of the world hadn't stepped in yet. Not completely.

There are his father's smile and his eyes, the only human being whom Sherlock never managed to be a cynical heartless bastard with, because he's the only one who knows his true nature; because only his father knows the truth. And maybe he's made of the matter of shadows, his father: he follows him everywhere and without saying a word, he never lets him defenceless. Never alone.

Behind that door there is the reason why he never says his full name: because there's his father's name in it, and he doesn't think it's worthy of it, he has always believed he wasn't.

When a breeze wakes him up, at night, Sherlock walks back until that door, comes before his father's face, looks straight into those eyes so alike his own and searches for something that should never be searched for. Then he lowers his eyes, as a half smile blooms from nowhere, closes the door and understands, just like every other time he had looked at him, that his father is an open book, a riddle already solved.

For him, his hidden, honest hero.

 

And then, he goes back to sleep.

 

_Close your eyes,_   
_have no fear,_   
_the monsters gone..._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Translation of ['La stessa materia delle ombre'](http://www.efpfanfic.net/viewstory.php?sid=2438882&i=1), an Italian work by my lovely friend [Annie](http://www.efpfanfic.net/viewuser.php?uid=180848). All the credits and the compliments go to her (and she totally deserves a lot of them).  
> If you can, please go read her original work. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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